The God Hunter
by eleanoralovesananias
Summary: The crew of the Enterprise are no stranger to unusual situations. But when a gravitational disturbance that damages the ship is quickly followed by a badly injured Q passing out on the bridge, they are forced to face a cosmic danger capable of killing a Q with no ally but the unstable, sometimes immoral, and dying trickster who has plagued them since the beginning of their mission.
1. What's Normal For the Enterprise?

"Set course for Starbase 489," Riker commanded, leaning over Data. "Warp 7."

"Yes, sir," Data responded blandly, his yellow eyes focused on the helm. "Warp 7."

Riker turned back to see Troi clutching her head and wincing. She saw him notice and quickly dropped her hands to her lap, but couldn't restrain another cringe of pain.

The sympathy on his face was barely concealed behind a mask of duty (the "Starfleet poker face," some called it). "Counselor, why don't you head down to sickbay and help Dr. Crusher with the wounded."

"I'm really all right," the counselor replied defensively.

"That wasn't a suggestion," was Riker's answer, letting his voice develop a necessary edge. Troi was definitely _not_ all right, but it could take some work to get her off the bridge when she thought she was needed.

Troi gave a noise which, if she weren't a Starfleet officer, would have been a huff, and left the bridge.

Riker tapped his communicator. "Riker to sickbay."

Dr. Crusher's smooth voice replied. "This is sickbay."

"Counselor Troi is coming your way, under orders to help with the wounded. Do me a favor and look her over when she gets there. Don't let her refuse."

"I'll do my best," the doctor answered, and her voice was somewhere between a smile and a sigh.

"Good. Riker out."

The moment he disconnected from his communicator, he tapped on it again. "Riker to engineering."

"Engineering here, Commander," came Geordi's slightly staticky voice.

Riker's brow furrowed. "Come in, Geordi."

"I'm here, Commander. The explosion hit the ship near here; there's still some leftover radiation which is tending to interfere with our communications. It'll dissipate soon," Geordi reassured.

"Right," the first officer said dubiously. "Is there any news on what exactly caused that explosion?"

Down in engineering, Geordi was moving easily through his element, checking scanners, sensors, and pressing buttons. "It's weird, Commander," he answered out of nowhere after a pause, suddenly remembering that Riker was waiting for a reply. "It came from the middle of space. There was nothing there - not a planet, not a star, no object at all, just empty space. It wasn't even strictly what we in the engineering field would call an _explosion._ It was... I guess you'd call it an imbalance in gravity, caused by some kind of distortion in space-time. I need more time to study it."

"All right," Riker responded. "You have until we reach a starbase; then we have to give a report to Starfleet. Report any new findings directly to the Captain."

"Understood, sir," was Geordi's reply. "Engineering out."

Riker rung the door chime on Picard's ready room.

Captain Picard looked up from reading. "Come in," he called, pressing a button and sliding open the door. Riker entered.

"Any news on the cause of the explosion?" the Captain asked, putting away his book and not meeting his first officer's eyes.

"Apparently some sort of gravitational disturbance. I've ordered Geordi to report any further discoveries directly to you."

Picard nodded. "How is Dr. Crusher doing with the wounded?"

"Almost everyone is expected to make a full recovery." The Commander paused, hating his duty to report eveything. "There have been a few more fatalities since the explosion. The casualty count is now 6, all nonessential personnel."

Picard closed his eyes. "Thank you, Commander." It was clearly a dismissal.

Riker nodded. "Yes, sir." _You're welcome_ really didn't seem right, considering what he was being thanked for.

Picard turned back to his book for solace, but just for a moment, he could hear the screams of his crew on the _Stargazer_ , complete with sudden headache. Dr. Crusher had assured him it was just an aftereffect - like a mental afterimage of trauma, nothing that would impair his function - yet it sometimes became close to unbearable in moments of stress. Like this one.

It was about to get a lot more stressful.


	2. The Enterprise Has No Normal

Riker sat in the captain's chair and sighed, fidgeting with his fingers. There was nothing to do now until they reached the starbase. It rankled at him that there were wounded, some dead, and all he could do was wait.

Worf stared out at the star-speckled viewscreen and growled slightly, on edge and not knowing why. He fingered his phaser. A thousand Klingon instincts were telling him to fire it, but his logical reasoning pointed out that there was nothing to fire at. He growled again, shifting.

Troi hissed while scanning a patient, scrunching up her face. Dr. Crusher looked at her in mild surprise.

"Something wrong?" the doctor asked, as calm as ever on the outside, even while wanting to scream on the inside.

Troi threw her an infuriated glare, before relenting and answering tightly, "I'm picking up... _agitation_ from the crew." Her knuckles were white on the tricorder. "It's very distracting."

Dr. Crusher wanted to throw her against the wall and let her know just how distracting _she_ was being. Instead she responded - her mellow voice undercut with irritation - "Good thing you're here with me, then."

Wesley sat, his latest project forgotten, kicking the wall and spinning in his chair, back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and-

Even Picard shifted, and sighed, and gritted his teeth. He attempted to focus on his book, but set it aside after several tries.

Geordi, unusually on edge, snapped at any crewmember who came too close to the engines, even Barclay, and especially poor clumsy Sonya.

Most surprisingly of all, Data twitched sporadically while sitting at the helm, struck by an unusual desire to smash it and run away screaming. He instantly began running a diagnostic, but not before a long arc of electricity sparked unnoticed across his head, and the ever so subtle smell of smoke wafted off.

Meanwhile, from the point of the explosion, space buckled. Time ran into a wall, became confused, and began walking in circles. The universe began to bleed. A small object, something like water, something like a flame, was spat out from the gash.

A bright flash of light, followed by a sound like a clap of thunder, set the bridge crew of the Enterprise on their feet. Right in front of them, standing dazed on the deck of the bridge, was _Q_.

But not the Q they knew. There was no scornful greeting, no sudden forcefield, no unexpected transformation of what used to be safe space into a ruthless game of cat-and-mouse for his amusement.

He was in the form they generally knew him in, complete with the Starfleet uniform he insisted on mocking them with.

He also looked like he'd gotten into a fistfight with a blender.

The entire bridge crew gaped at the bruised and bloodied, torn and burned and gashed face of a being they _knew_ should not be capable of injury or pain.

Q stared at them, his eyes glazed with pain, so that they couldn't be sure he recognized them or even knew where he was.

Then his eyes rolled back into his head and he crumpled to the floor of the bridge, unconscious.


	3. Some Things Are Not Normal Anywhere

The entire bridge crew of the Enterprise gaped in very un-Starfleetish shock. Even Data tilted his head and ran a program to calculate the probability of such an event. Worf turned his phaser on the 'kill' setting without even thinking about it. Several ensigns working on the computers in the background tried to melt into the brightly-lit deck, their eyes as wide as saucers - Q! They had just seen Q! - and already embellishing the story they were going to tell their friends. The helmsman completely forgot about her work and just stared, mouth hanging open.

The prone body of the unconscious Q was still. His head lay to one side, one arm was thrown across his chest, and except for the injuries, he looked almost peaceful. In his sleep, he could have been mistaken for harmless.

Riker stared down at the sleeping god sprawled at his feet. His hand was frozen in the act of calling the captain, fingers hovering just millimeters from his communicator. He'd never gotten a chance to look at the man up close. He could see Q's eyes flicking back and forth under his eyelids at a rate he wouldn't call human. He wouldn't have known how to describe it, but there was a sort of haze to Q's edges, like he was always just out of focus. And, the commander noticed, he cast no shadow.

The trickster's face was blotched with purple and red bruising, concentrated around his left cheek and jawline. There was a long, and very deep from the look of it, gash over his right eye, which had dripped blood all over his face and down onto his uniform. Beads of it were still running along his chin, and there was a strangely disturbing quality to the blood, something about its color or its viscosity, that he wouldn't have known how to explain.

Both of his eyes were swollen, like a black eye, but instead of being mottled purple, the skin around the eyes was a stark white, shaded in with a sort of sickly green-yellow. They made his eyes look bugged and reptilian. His lashes brushed his cheeks, but Riker noticed with quite a start that the eyelashes were not actually connected to his lids, but rather floated about two millimeters away from them.

More gashes, all of them deep, long, and perfectly straight, as if made with a scalpel, continued down his neck, and were visible on his chest, shoulders and legs through the tears in his stolen uniform.

Large swaths of the uniform were crisped and shaded golden and black. The right side of his face was shiny and red with burns; up near his temple, the skin had bubbled and blackened.

And probably worst of all, a huge chunk of his face - half of his nose, a part of his cheek, the lower half of his eye socket, and a piece of his chin - had been ripped clean away, leaving a strange assortment of muscles and silver threads he could only assume were nerves, that curled and rippled over one another in spiral patterns - jagged geometric shapes - floral - was that paisley?

He realized, wide-eyed, that the inside of Q's face appeared to be _moving_ , writhing and constantly rearranging their patterns. And there was _something_ -

something _in_ there -

something _huge -_

 _\- the void, the neverending abyss of circles going 'round and 'round and 'round while children cry backwards, shining cities gleaming on the edge of the inferno, dragons made of mirrors that reflect things that never were -_

Riker straightened up. "That's quite enough of that," he muttered. He locked down the feeling that his mind was burning and saved it for another time. Duty. He tapped his communicator.


	4. In Which Picard Needs a Drink

Picard answered his communicator. "Picard." He didn't waste words with his rank. Everyone knew who he was; stating his rank every time he answered his communicator would just be arrogance.

"Captain..." There was a pause. Riker's voice took Picard aback. He sounded unsteady, almost nervous. The captain sat up straight in his chair and listened concernedly

"We have a... _situation_ on the bridge." On the other end, Riker was unsure how to explain... this. He could hardly tell his captain he'd seen visions of things no human should see in the ripped-up flesh of an injured god. Having the first officer relieved of duty for a mental examination wouldn't help anyone.

"What is it, Commander?" Picard insisted.

Riker cleared his throat and said, in stiffest, most duty-bound voice, "It's Q, sir. He's on the bridge."

" _God damn-"_ The communicator clicked off.

Heads turned in surprise as the sound of something shattering came from the captain's ready room.

The door slid neatly open, and revealed a not-so-neat Captain Picard hiding a fist full of glass shards behind his back and trying to look dignified.

Riker would have raised an eyebrow in any other situation, but he was still shaken and in a perfect position to understand the Captain's out-of-character outburst. He just nodded and let Picard see Q for himself.

Picard stopped in his tracks when he saw the injured Q. He quickly hid his amazement behind his perfect Starfleet poker face before the crew could see it, and stood looking down at the unconscious body of this first and greatest adversary.

He could hardly believe what his eyes were seeing. _What the hell could do this to a Q?_ The kind of power this would take... he couldn't even imagine it. This was a man who could defeat the _Borg_ just by snapping his fingers.

And why had he come here? Surely if he were in pain or afraid, he would have gone home to the Q Continuum. He almost suspected that Q was messing with their heads. Any minute now, he would pop up, fully healed, and laugh at their gullibility.

But there it was. Q's enitre face was leathery brown with burns, the skin cripsed and bubbled in places, and the curves of the bubbles scorched a charred black. There was ash collected in the valleys of his skin, as if he had been lying in a burned-down building for some time. The entire upper half of his uniform had been ripped away, the edges torn in a manner that suspiciously resembed teeth marks. The flesh underneath had been ripped through like paper, whole globules of blood crusting thickly around wounds that, like, the uniform, looked horribly like bites from enormous, serrated teeth.

One of his eyes had been punctured, and white pus and yellowish water had dribbled down his face and were dripping from his cheeks like diseased tears. The exposed flesh of the eye socket was a sickly, horrible purplish-black, crisscrossed with bulging red and blue veins.

The veins pulsated rhythmically, making an almost subsonic bass sound, like a distorted heartbeat, that made the Captain's very bones tremble. He leaned over, unable to look away, somehow mesmerized... but - oh _Dieu, mon dieu, qu'Ai-je fait - ma famille - c'est ce qui leur est arrivé - mon dieu -_ and worst of all -

There was something _inside -_

something _writhing -_

something _climbing out -_

 _Children playing in a park, seeming like children, except that their mouths were open in fear, stretched, distended, eyes wide and black, as the -_

"Captain, snap out of it!" Riker's firm hand jolted him back to reality.

Picard stared at his first officer, his eyes wide. He slowly came back to reality. He blinked.

"Don't look at it," the Commander advised.

Picard coughed and became his usual stiff self again. "Thank you, Commander." He turned to Worf. "Get a security detail to the bridge, now." His mind hurt terribly, but he blinked back the imprints of the visions he'd seen and clung to duty like a Starfleet Captain should.


End file.
